No Limits

Ashrita Furman will talk to Alec Wilkinson about his life as a Guinness World Record-breaker, and attempt to break a few records on the spot.

Ashrita Furman currently holds more than a hundred and fifty Guinness World Records, including the record for most records. Since 1979, when he completed twenty-seven thousand consecutive jumping jacks, he has set more than four hundred records, among them performing 9,628 situps, walking eighty miles with a milk bottle on his head, and balancing eight hundred eggs on end simultaneously.

Alec Wilkinson has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1980. “Higher, Faster, Madder,” his Profile of Ashrita Furman, appeared in last December’s World Changers Issue. He is the author of ten books, the most recent of which is “The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration.”

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.